The Elongated Word Trend

By ROB KYFF and Special To The Courant

Jul 27, 2014 | 3:00 AM

Don't look now, but our everyday speech is becoming eloooooongated. Not only are more and more kids saying that something is "soooooooo cool," but professional jounalists are also hooting like owls. A Courant sportswriter, for instance, recently wrote, "the Yankees wooooooooonn."

Then along comes the World Cup, with its hyperactive announcers bellowing "Gooooooooooooooal!" whenever a team scores. I watched the games in Spanish on the Uni channel, and that was the only word I understood.

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This raises the question: How many "o"'s should be used when rendering this sound in print. The Courant writer used 12, but in this article I've varied the number according to whim.

How far will this trend go? Will it spread to other vowels? Will we soon be prattling about and Kim Kardaaaaaaaashian? Angelina Joleeeeeeeeee?

Vladimir Puuuuuuuuuutin? Stay tuuuuuuuuuuned.

Another dispatch from the Word Front . . .

o You Knoooooooow – Hillary Clinton raised some eyebrows when she told newscaster Diane Sawyer that the Clintons were "dead broke" upon leaving the White House. But the aspect of the interview that most worried Oren Spiegler of Upper Saint Clair, Pa., was Clinton's frequent use of the parenthetical filler "you know."

"She is the queen of 'you knows'," Spiegler writes, "which she cannot avoid when speaking extemporaneously." At one point in the Sawyer interview, for instance, Clinton said, "We struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea's education. You know, it was not easy."

In the same interview, she stumbled into You Know-vllle again when discussing her feelings about being continually judged: "You get a little worried about, O.K., you know, people over on this side are loving what I am wearing, looking like, saying. People over on this side aren't. You know, your natural tendency is how do you bring people together so that you can better communicate?"

An occasional "you know" in an unscripted interview is understandable, of course. It can even be a handy device for gaining time to think. When Bill Clinton was president, for instance, he used the time-buying phrase "I think" so often that his aides made it into a noun, referring to his "I think."

But too many "I thinks" or "you knows" can become distracting, even irritating. Someone in the know should advise Hillary Clinton to rein in "you know."